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Sunday, August 4, 2013

Something Amazing: 40%!!

Saturday morning, we somehow talk ourselves, our friends, their
parents and my parents to get get up early and go to a small 5K, the Bridge to Adoption 5K. It had been quite a hectic week, since both Matt and I have been busy with HiveBio stuff, but we wanted to run this event.

Fig 1. Before the Race. Matt and Julie are saving every ounce of energy.

1) It's super close.
2) Jeffrey and Matt ran last year, and came in 1 and 2.
3)
Adoption is even more on everyone's minds of late.... and this event is
fundraising for the adoption of a second child in the organizers
family.
4) As always, the multi-person multiplier seemed in my favor here.
Since I was with my parents as I was registering, they
agreed to come and walk, under the condition that we would all have
breakfast together afterwards. It's a nice run through Blyth Park, and
although Matt and Jeffrey both put up better times than last year,
someone else beat them. But, hey, we won gift cards in the raffle, and
Julie even won a pair of new shoes in the raffle. How great is that!

Fig 2. Post-race, and post-breakfast. A good time was had by all.

And then I came home, and added the tally to the spreadsheet. 7 people at the 5K, my time at HiveBio,
Matt's time with the HiveBio computers, the value of the computer
themselves...., and holy cats! We just hit 40%!! Seriously, more than
$12,000 raised for charity.

While it is obvious to
me now that I need to spend some time explaining what I am doing with
HiveBio, I also want to spend some time reflecting on the momentum we
have currently. I've mentioned this before; the best ways to volunteer
time are the ways that a most compatible with your lifestyle. I can
easily ask my mom and grandmother to help me make dinner for the shelter
because they like to cook. I can easily convince Jeffrey to run a 5K
(who in turn can get the rest of his family to tag along), since he
loves running anyway. I filled up our garage with old computers, and
Matt was keen to get fixing them. My plan for the rest of the year is to
highlight diferent causes that I like to support, and hopefully this
will help spring to mind ways that others can help as well.

About Me

As a recent Ph.D. in molecular virology, I am exploring the many things I can do with all that education (and the $.25 million investment it represents), and recording it for posterity.
Feel free to contact me about any of this at sandlin dot preecs at gmail dot com
Please connect with me on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/molecularvirologist